It is in, in fact, very decisively going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I can already feel the outrage that is about to pour out on this site: the conspiracy theories, the bungled attempts at “math” (which, btw, are almost always inaccurate or wrong), the ugly, sexist memes of HRC that we can all laugh at because hey, if it’s HRC, who gives a fuck?

But before you angrily typesmash into your keyboard about how the establishment is rigged and how the DNC better abide by the “will of the people” and hand the nom to Sanders on a silver platter, I’d like to ask you to take a deep breath and step back for a moment.

First, you need to accept that the fact that Sanders has come so far is a big fucking DEAL. Last year, he was an unknown. This year, he proved to be an excellent challenge to the Democratic establishment, and he’s already inspired dozens of copycats around the country to challenge establishment corruption. It’s a GREAT thing.

But let’s not pretend that he was/is a perfect candidate. I’d actually argue that him and HRC are probably no more and no less “corrupt” or “twisted” than the other. This was especially true in the last few weeks of the campaign, where he got especially ugly and weird, whether it was racking up no less than 639 pages of FEC violations (the irony) to not denouncing the violence and personal death threats sent to super delegates (how hard is it to JUST say “that’s not OK!”? i mean really) to falsely accusing HRC of FEC violations (spoiler: she has none). Honestly, if Tumblr had bothered to vet Sanders even a quarter as much as they did HRC, he would not be this site’s favorite grandpa.

But that’s all counterproductive now. So as tempting as it is, I’m gonna let it go.

Now I’m gonna say something controversial:

HILLARY CLINTON? SHE’S NOT A TERRIBLE PERSON.

There. I said it. What a shocker.

People go on and on about how Sanders got the millennial vote (and handily, at that), but what they always leave out is that HRC got literally EVERY OTHER demographic. Why?

No really, why?

Simple: she LISTENS to them. And then she translates what she’s heard into policy.

Her job isn’t to preach at the bully pulpit. She listens. There’s a reason why she doesn’t hold rallies of thousands, but has garnered the vote of top people at practically every demographic or movement , whether it was the mothers of the movement (incl travyon martin and sandra bland’s mother), the fuckING human rights campaign, planned parenthood, literally every minority vote EVER, and others.

And she turned those inputs into real policy. No for real. Go read her policy statements. They are the most well-researched, detailed, boring things ever. They are GREAT. Her inner policy nerd probs came out because her plans are the most well researched of any candidate possibly ever, and will also put you right to sleep because of how disgustingly long and well written they are.

Now ppl are gonna say “oh she panders” or whatever but yA KNOW WHAT?!?

She also fucking follows through. For real.

Let’s take a famous example: HRC was against gay marriage until like 2013!1!1

(so was Obama, but i mean whatever right? he’s a guy so we cut him slack)

Also, she is the ONLY presidential candidate to have walked in a lgbt pride parade, EVER. (this pic is circa like 2002)

How’s that #throwbackthursday for ya?

My point is: she’s not right on the issues 100% of the time (wow she’s human?!? no wAY) BUT she will fight for the issues and get shit done.

So my plea is this:

Look for the good in HRC.

She’s a thoughtful person and a listener – those who know her have said that the former is in fact her best trait. Think she’s too center or right on your fave issues? FUCKINGTALK ABOUT IT.Let her campaign know.

I’m not asking anyone to tattoo HRC on their chest or start phonebanking for her tomorrow or anything like that. (In fact, don’t, that’s weird as shit)

Vote for Bernie in whatever primaries are left and do not feel the need to suddenly become a living breathing campaigner .

This has been a tough, tough election and I get that it will be very hard to get over the negative image you have of HRC, but I trust that people are smart enough to get it done. So do it, I beg of you.

And finally, like every pretentious ass post on this website ends…

REBLOG. SPREAD THIS SHIT LIKE WILDFIRE.

thx

There’s also the story Andrea Mitchell told tonight on MSNBC – about Hillary during her tenure as First Lady, traveling to China to give a speech about women’s rights, despite the resistance from the State Department. She hid the speech from them during the trip overseas, refusing to allow it to be vetted. There are dozens upon dozens of stories like that, before, during and after when she was last in the White House.

A lot of people either don’t remember or weren’t alive to know just how galvanizing, how much of a force Hillary was when Bill Clinton took office, and how unprecedented it was (outside of a few powerful examples, such as Eleanor Roosevelt) for a First Lady to be quite so strident and purposeful in matters of state – how much of a shock to the system it was to Washington. Hillary has always been controversial and a firebrand in her own way; she has always been despised by the GOP, which has thrown everything they have at her for almost 25 years but never taken her down. She has been tested, burnt, bowed but never broken. She’s been fighting for the issues she believes in since before she was Hillary Clinton. And she never stops working.

A rare politics reblog because the primary is finally over and we have ascended to the next level of hell.

This post has a more rah-rah than I generally prefer or espouse but it has useful information that many of you may not be aware of and also an image of Hillary Clinton with a watch on a shoelace around her neck which is, I cannot lie, the main reason I am reblogging it.

I’d like to add a couple of things: first, Rachel Maddow devoted her A block last night to the history of women running for president in the US and it almost made me cry. Please watch. Second, Rebecca Traister’s profile of Hillary Clinton, which you may already have seen, is the best piece of writing on her so far this election.

I keep thinking about Ezra Klein’s piece from Tuesday night (ETA: forgot the link) about her skill as a politician and how it’s essentially un-male:

But another way to look at the primary is that Clinton employed a
less masculine strategy to win. She won the Democratic primary by
spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the
entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female
approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and
winning over allies. Today, 208 members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; only eight have endorsed Sanders.

[…]

In this telling, in order to do something as hard as becoming the
first female presidential nominee of a major political party, she had to
do something extraordinarily difficult: She had to build a coalition,
supported by a web of relationships, that dwarfed in both breadth and
depth anything a non-incumbent had created before. It was a plan that
played to her strengths, as opposed to her (entirely male) challengers’
strengths. And she did it.

Hillary Clinton is a generationally talented politician — albeit
across a different set of dimensions than men tend to be talented
politicians.

He references her frequent comments that she is not a “natural” politician like Obama or Bill Clinton, and draws on Traister’s suggestion in her piece that “charisma” as we understand it is arguably a masculine trait:

She can’t just suffer through the
indignity of campaigning and then hole up with her policy papers. It’s
not enough to have a plan; you have to sell it to the country, over and
over again. Obama proved to be particularly adept at using the media to
disseminate his administration’s messages to the audiences it was trying
to reach, but he is a masterful orator. Bill Clinton, too. Even George
W. Bush was charismatic in his way.

But if, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with
no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially
plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who
knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic,
perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance. It’s worth asking
to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait.
Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men
doing it?

Hillary Clinton is not a perfect presidential candidate because nobody is a perfect presidential candidate. But I think that Klein has hit on something important, which is that she got to a place where she could feasibly become a presidential candidate in what is likely the only way a woman in this country could, certainly the first time: she fucking networked. A woman could not have run Obama’s campaign. She would not have been taken seriously. And a woman could not have run Sanders’ campaign, because if a woman had somehow managed to be elected to Congress for ~25 years and then gone around the country yelling about The System, having not actually passed any meaningful legislation during her time in office, and not gotten endorsed by almost any of her colleagues, she would have been ripped to shreds inside of a month.

Instead, Clinton worked and worked and worked. And her punishment for that is now that people penalize her for having done so because she is an insider. Well, no shit. How the hell else could she have gotten to this point? I hope that in future we will be able to have female politicians who have an easier route. But if they do it will in part be due to her working her ass off for 25 years and getting shit on the entire time for doing so.